I was under the impression that the Q&A was an official source of rules. Does anyone know if that is the case? I may be wrong because I had printed out some Q&A’s and we sent a student to the question box to challange a call that we thought contradicted a Q&A. When we showed the head ref the Q&A we were told they are not official.
Yup. Official.
I would suggest contacting FIRST. There has been times when Q&A answers have been reversed and its possible this is the case. If not then the feedback needs to be brough to the attention of those in charge of ensuring the refs are up to speed.
Out of curiosity, which Q&A were you citing?
This may sound like lawyering but I promise it was not. We send a student to the question box because we had a question based on what we had read in the Q&A and how it was called on the field. To set it up this was in the elims. A robot was climbing on the front of the pyramid. Our robot drove to the feeder station to refill. As it turned the corner it touched the far back corner of a pyramid with its bumper (about 8 feet from the climbing robot). Because we touched the pyramid we were assessed a penalty per G27, and given a red card, and our alliance forfeited the match. We asked the head ref why that was considered “consequential contact”. And referred the Q&A below where it states “For example, if a ROBOT contacts the opponent’s PYRAMID as it drives past it, and no opponent ROBOTS are nearby or affected, the action would be considered inconsequential.” It is completely justifiable for the ref to say in his judgment it is consequential because touching any part of the pyramid as someone was climbing must be affected and is worthy of a red card. And he did say something similar. However he also said that the Q&A is not official so the below did not matter. We won the match and I am not bitter I am just wondering how to proceed in the future if a situation comes up that is more clearly addressed in a Q&A to show a ref. (I understand that G27 is a little arbitrary and not cut and dry enough to probably ever get overturned)
Q190
Q.What determines “inconsequential” contact with an opponent PYRAMID? Is consequentiality based on the consequence of the whole action, or only on how the itself pyramid is contacted? e.g. Is it legal to touch an opponent’s pyramid while hitting climbing/shooting opponent (not contacting its pyramid)?
A.The determination of if an act is consequential or not is determined based on what happens because of the action. For example, if a ROBOT contacts the opponent’s PYRAMID as it drives past it, and no opponent ROBOTS are nearby or affected, the action would be considered inconsequential. If a ROBOT contacts the opponent’s PYRAMID and blocks an opponent’s attempt to CLIMB, it would be considered consequential. Contacting an opponent ROBOT who is contacting its PYRAMID is illegal per [G30].
According to the game manual und Referee Interaction, the referee has ultimate authority In the ARENA, so I assume this means he could overrule a Q&A ruling? Or better said, the head refs interpretation of the Q&A is final?
Referee Interaction Game Manual
The Head Referee has the ultimate authority in the ARENA during the event, but may receive input from additional sources, e.g. Game Designers, FIRST personnel, and technical staff. The Head Referee rulings are final. The Head Referee will not review recorded replays under any circumstances.
Correct. The head referee is always has the final decision. It is up to him/her to interpret the rules the way they want. It will always be the referee’s judgement call as to what is “consequential”. Since the head ref wasn’t the one to make the call on the field and we questioned him in this case it is a completely acceptable answer for him to say how he interprets that rule. I don’t think anyone disputes that. I was more curious as to whether his statement about the Q&A not being official was correct. Which as I’m getting from you guys it was not.
Thanks for your responses everyone.
A ref should not be allowed to overrule a Q&A response. In my mind, that is tantamount to changing the rules on a whim. Only NH gets to do that 
I remain naively optimistic that FIRST will, someday, write rules that are not ambiguous and do not rely on any sort of subjective judgement by the officials.
I’m no game theory expert, but I’m not sure if you could ever cover all the possibilities of a real life game in a meaningful way without human judgement. That’s what makes D&D with a group of friends way more fun than say, Halo 
One of the things I dislike about this particular rule (if it was called the way the game makers had wanted it to be) is that if we were to have smashed right into their robot mid climb, it would have been a technical foul per G30 and we would have won the match. Since we grazed the back of the pyramid it is a red card, and we lose the match.
It seems like there may be some misinformation about what should be regarded as fact. I don’t think that it is the refs fault for what happened and to me it is unclear exactly what each rule is meant to do and is interpreted differently.
I’m no expert, but I’ve dabbled, and have some limited professional game-writing experience…
Pretty much every game in existence (save Calvinball) is permissive: you can do exactly what you are given permission to do, and you may not do anything in-game that you are not explicitly allowed to do. This is true for everything from football to Monopoly. (Football has a bit of proscription-flavor in the realm of human physiology, but not much.)
FIRST games are not permissive, they’re proscriptive: by their nature, anything you aren’t prohibited from doing is legal.
Proscriptive rules sets are much, much harder to write than permissive rules sets, and I daresay that it might be impossible to make a proscriptive rules set that is both judgement-free and accessible in terms of length, usability, and so forth.
I believe the general order of things in the case of a disagreement:
FIRST HQ>Head Ref>Q&A>Team Update>The Manual
Of course, the head ref is supposed to follow all Q&A, updates, and manual entries but for interpretation he or she is the ultimate authority at an event.
It’s a funny thing about officiating. What referees say is final (unless the rules of the competition specify some kind of appeal, which FIRST doesn’t); however, in theory, they are required to enforce all of the rules, and considering that FRC Q&A is considered “official”, they are also required to enforce those. This is a quote I like from a website about soccer refereeing:
*As the referee, you are the sole judge of facts, but still at the mercy of the rules. So if you say that a defender grew an extra arm out of his head to deflect the ball away from the goal, your league will stand behind you (though possibly not very close in this case). But if you then award a throw-in for handling the ball, you’ve broken the rules and your decision can be contested, especially if it affects the outcome of the game. *
More on-topic, hopefully FIRST will clarify to all its referees in the future that the Q&A is official, and hopefully make it (or selected parts of it, at least) required reading.
The Q&A is intended to provide guidance on the interpretation of the rules… but the responses are not rules unto themselves.
The head ref was entirely welcome to take the advice that inconsequential contact need not be called, however they may still interpret this contact as sufficient to call.
What you, as the team receiving the DQ, view as inconsequential may have appeared to the ref, at the time, as having consequence… or potential consequence.
Or the ref may have completely blown the call. Either way is perfectly irrelevant to the fact that they call was made and it doesn’t sound like it was necessarily a bad call.
Jason
Actually it is more like this:
FIRST HQ>Head Ref>Team Update>The Manual>Q&A
The Q&A’s primarily purpose is to provide official insight and interpretation about the rules in the manual (it also is good feedback among other things). It does not make new rules or overrule existing rules, only a team update can do that. The Q&A occasionally has contradictions and does get updated without a team update (sometimes after a good follow up question). The most notable update this year was the early 54" cylinder questions where the answers completely reversed and Team UPDATE - 2013-01-15 was released. The Q&A should provide good guidelines for Refs, RI and teams to interpret the rules involved any decision, but it still is a judgement call by the parties involved.
The Q&A is not specific enough to judge an actual match or robot. Consider it a small (in comparison) set of official rule interpretations that does not overlap with the much larger set of official rule interpretations at competition. The goal is for these two interpretations to be as similar as possible through communication & training, but the only thing they truly have in common is the same set of rules. As Peter pointed out, it is inherently difficult to write these rules, and we will always need judgement to enforce them.
A G27 violation does not require a Red Card, only a Technical Foul. A Red Card is only required if an opponent’s Climb is affected, in which case that opponent should also be credited for a Level 3 climb (moot in an elim match where a Red Card is already issued). Also, if an opponents Climb is affected, then the cited Q&A probably isn’t very useful. The better initial question to ask in the ? box is if the opponent’s Climb was affected and proceed from there.
There’s a distinction between “official” (it is issued on FIRST’s authority, usually by the GDC) and “enforceable” (it is binding upon FRC participants, because a rule mandates it). The Q&As are official, but not directly enforceable. Instead, they reference official rules (from the book) that are enforceable.
My interpretation (particularly in cases of inspection) has been that the rules must be enforced. Where an update changes a rule, that new rule is what’s enforceable. I view that as the dominant principle because teams are clearly and uniformly advised of the rules and of the expectation that they be followed. Until FIRST specifically designates an authority other than the latest rules, this is the most equitable way to proceed. (I don’t view the lead officials as being authorities in their own right: their rulings stand, but their rulings aren’t intrinsically correct, just because they made them. I address headquarters below: unless they change the rules, what they say is official but unenforceable.)
As I see it, Q&A responses (and non-rule portions of updates) stand out among official, unenforceable communications because of their visibility to teams. Since teams are specifically instructed where to find this information, they are a signal to the teams and the officials that FIRST believes the rules should be interpreted in a particular way. If that addresses a plausible ambiguity in the rule, then the matter is resolved—the Q&A has clarified the existing meaning without introducing any new constraints. If unresolved interpretations remain, or if the Q&A cannot be logically applied to the rule, then it’s up to the officials to fall back on the rules themselves.1 In these cases, teams should be given the benefit of conforming to any reasonable interpretation of the rule.
In terms of other official, but unenforceable actions, I draw a parallel between a GDC interpretation for the convenience of the on-site officials (often requested by phone) and the Q&As. These are timely and important suggestions that the rule is correctly interpreted in a particular way—but the competition officials must make the final calls themselves, based on the observed facts and the rules, of their own accord, pursuant to the authority vested in them by FIRST. The officials must pay particular attention to equity, especially because these communications are not broadcast to the FRC community through the usual channels. If these things can all be reconciled, then so much the better.
Similarly, an e-mail from frcteams, while official, cannot be held to be binding upon non-parties to the conversation—and because it’s not binding on non-parties, it’s hard to rule it’s binding on the parties themselves, because that would constitute special treatment (which is only justifiable in special cases, such as when the rules provide for it, or when there are extenuating circumstances and a consensus to set aside the rules2).
1 For example, if a rule said “black” in the context of a computer, and a Q&A later clarified black to mean #000000 in 24-bit RGB colour space, then that would be enforceable, because this is a valid definition of “black” that provides a logically valid resolution to the ambiguity. If the Q&A instead ruled that “black” meant #FF0000 (red), the Q&A should be ignored, because it cannot be logically applied to the rules.
2 In case of a major contingency—e.g. robot impaled by forklift, dropped from loading dock, shipped to Timbuktu, etc.—the rules should provide an explicit procedure to authorize the suspension of whatever rules are necessary to provide the desired outcome. Failing that (as the current rules do), precedent indicates that FIRST is comfortable with officials taking the initiative to set aside some rules in an effort to achieve equity. (Sometimes in consultation with FIRST headquarters.)
A couple Q&A’s I asked on this subject have finally been answered:
Q593 Q. In the rare case that a Q&A answer contradicts the FRC Manual and/or Team Update, which takes precedence?
*A. Should this occur, the FRC Manual and/or Team Update take precedence.
*
Q594 Q. 1.)What is the order of precedence for the following rule authorities in the case of contradiction: Head Ref, Manual, Team Update, Q&A, FIRST HQ? 2.) If the head ref has higher precedence than Q&A, is Q&A to be interpreted as rule or as guideline?
*A. 1) The Game Manual is the authority. Referees are empowered to make judgments about game play per the Manual and any clarification via the Q&A and other input from event staff and FRC. 2) The Q&A is a tool for clarification about rules and/or the intent behind the rules. Any ambiguity or disconnect between the Manual and the Q&A is unintended and the Manual takes precedence.
*
594 questions and counting… a tough task for any set of refs to memorize.
So long as the ‘bump’ didn’t slow the climbing robot down, cause it to fall, or otherwise cause grief to its team I’m not sure there’s a reason to call the bump consequential for this case. However, it would set a very dangerous precedent for referee calls if some teams realize that they can intentionally ‘bump’ the pyramid on the way by while a climb is happening. In retrospect, the ref probably made the best long-term decision without realizing it even though the interpretation of ‘consequential’ is in question.
Maybe I’ll (or a certain community) should create a digest of the important ones for ‘essential reading’ both for teams and refs.